In November 1940 Bonetti was promoted to
rear admiral, and at the end of the year he was sent to
Eritrea and given command of the Naval High Command East Africa, with headquarters in
Massawa. Between 31 March and 2 April, the last five remaining destroyers (
Nazario Sauro,
Daniele Manin,
Cesare Battisti,
Tigre,
Leone and
Pantera) were sent on a last attack against
Port Sudan; all other ships, on Bonetti's orders,
scuttled themselves to avoid being captured, part of them in the port of Massawa and the others in the
Dahlak Islands. Bonetti arranged the scuttling of the ships in Massawa (nine Italian and five German merchant ships, the
torpedo boats
Giovanni Acerbi and
Vincenzo Giordano Orsini, the
minelayer Ostia , two
gunboats three tugboats, as well as two
floating docks and a floating crane) so that their wrecks would blockade the port entrances and render the harbour unusable for a long period. All ships were scuttled between 1 April and 8 April 1941. Bonetti was also the commander of the Massawa Fortress Area and its garrison, which numbered about 10,000 men; after the end of the Battle of Keren, this was the last Italian military presence in Eritrea, along with a few hundred men in the
Assab naval base. Massawa was encircled by Commonwealth forces on 5 April 1941;
General Lewis Heath telephoned Bonetti and requested him to surrender and not to obstruct the port by scuttling ships, threatening otherwise to abandon the Italian civilian population in
East Africa. Bonetti twice refused the ultimatum; on 8 April, the
7th Indian Infantry Brigade and the
10th Indian Infantry Brigade simultaneously attacked Massawa, supported by
tanks of the
4th Royal Tank Regiment,
Free French troops and the
Royal Air Force (RAF), which bombed Italian artillery positions. While the attack of the 7th Indian Brigade was repelled, the 10th Indian Brigade and the tanks managed to penetrate the defences on the western side, while the Gaullist forces broke through in the southwestern sector. Bonetti capitulated in the afternoon of 8 April, after having as much equipment as possible dumped into the harbour. For his defence of Massawa, Bonetti was awarded the Officer's Cross of the
Military Order of Italy and the Cross of
Order of the German Eagle. He was sent to a
POW camp in
British India, and remained there until 1945. Repatriated after the war, Bonetti was promoted to the rank of
vice admiral and placed in command of the Livorno Naval Academy; he was placed in auxiliary for age limits in October 1947. In 1956, he was promoted to
admiral and transferred to the reserve. He died in Genoa on 19 February 1961. ==Footnotes==